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From pop stars to tefillin pop-ups, Oct. 7 changed how Israel’s ‘somewhat observant’ practice Judaism
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — In the weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, religiously charged videos started circulating on social media. Dozens of young women posted videos of themselves cutting up their “immodest” clothing, jeans, crop tops, minidresses, vowing to replace them with modest skirts and head coverings.
In one viral TikTok clip, a young influencer solemnly shears her wardrobe to shreds, declaring it an offering for national deliverance. “Creator of the world, as I cut these clothes, cut away the harsh decrees against Israel,” she says, explaining that she would not even donate the garments lest she “cause someone else to stumble” by wearing them.
Other images circulated too, of tefillin pop-ups, neighborhood challah-bakes and, on both social media and the street, a noticeable rise in religious amulets and pendants. Hamsas, Stars of David and necklaces shaped like the map of Israel or the ancient Temple in Jerusalem appeared everywhere.
Two years later, as the grinding war in Gaza largely wound down, those early scenes have taken on the feel of a specific moment in time. Still, the spiritual jolt of those first weeks has not fully faded, and increased religious practice has become part of the country’s daily rhythm.
A poll released in November by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that 27% of Israelis have increased their observance of religious customs since the war began. Roughly a third of Jewish Israelis say they are praying more frequently than before the war, and about 20% report reading the Tanach or psalms more often.
JPPI head Shuki Friedman said that many Israelis, and especially the young, felt the war had reconnected them to tradition and Jewish identity “not necessarily in a halachic way, but in a way that shows up very strongly in their lives and in the public space.”
Crucially, the shift has been most dramatic among Israelis who already had one foot in tradition — those raised in “masorti” or traditional but not strictly observant, homes. While the masorti category has its roots in Middle Eastern and North African (Mizrahi) communities, where religious observance was historically more integrated into daily life but less rigid than in European Orthodoxy, today masorti Israelis span all sectors of Israeli society. (The category is distinct from the Masorti movement, the name for Conservative Judaism in Israel and Europe.) Roughly one-third of Israeli Jews identify as masorti, with JPPI breaking the group into two categories: “somewhat religious” and “not so religious.”
The Jewish demographer Steven M. Cohen once quipped that masorti Israelis are those who “violate the laws that they do not wish to change” – meaning they accept traditional Jewish law, known as halacha, as valid, but selectively observe it in practice. Cohen also noted there’s no real American equivalent, though the closest parallel might be “non-observant Orthodox.”
Among young Jews who identified as “somewhat religious” masorti, 51% of respondents in the poll reported deepening their religious practices during the war.
David Mizrachi is one of them. Raised in a masorti home, Mizrachi had never been consistent about synagogue attendance, Shabbat observance or laying tefillin. Since Oct. 7, he said, he does all three — religiously.
For him, the change grew out of the shock of the attacks and the losses that touched his own circle. He personally knew the Vaknin twins, killed at the Nova party, and Elkana Bohbot, the hostage snatched from the rave who was released after two years in captivity. Those events, he said, pushed him into “cheshbon nefesh,” a Jewish reckoning with his identity.
“I understood that these enemies and terrorists came because we were Jewish, not because we were Israelis,” he said.
In some households the response went further still. Rozet Levy Dy Bochy, raised masorti and married to a non-Jewish Dutch man who decided after Oct. 7 to convert, said Oct. 7 drew her deeper into observance.
“It felt like we were in a horror film, but faith provided an anchor,” she said. “Knowing that everything was part of God’s plan and in the end something different, something good, was waiting for us was comforting.”
The dynamic experienced by Mizrachi, shaped by the violence that afflicted people he personally knew, aligns with another survey released in September by the Hebrew University, which found that direct exposure to the war, whether through bereavement or injury, was closely associated with changes in religiosity and spirituality. Roughly half of respondents reported higher levels of religiosity and spirituality, including a quarter who said they had become more religious and a third who described a rise in spirituality.
That trend has been reflected most vividly in the accounts of released hostages that have filled Hebrew media over the past year, with former hostages describing making kiddush on water, keeping Shabbat for the first time or rejecting pitas during Passover in the tunnels beneath Gaza.
It has rippled through pop culture, too. Actor Gal Gadot told her 106 million followers on Instagram that while she’s “not a religious person,” she had decided to light a candle and pray for the safe return of all the hostages.
Israel’s biggest pop star Noa Kirel, not known for religious observance, marked her November wedding with a mikveh immersion, a hafrashat challah (challah-separation) gathering, along with a henna party of the type that is common among Mizrahi Jews.
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Another of Israel’s most popular singers, Omer Adam, long considered secular, now wears tzitzit, studies Torah, and keeps Shabbat.
It’s now common to see Israeli celebrities sharing Shabbat candle-lighting rituals, including secular TV host Ofira Asayag, who, a year into the war, pledged to do so on-air until the hostages came home.
For sociologist Doron Shlomi, who studies Israeli religiosity, none of this is surprising, because collective crises often produce similar effects. Drawing on research from earthquakes, wars and the Covid-19 pandemic, he described the two years of war as “a kind of laboratory” for seeing how people turn toward faith.
“War always brings two things,” he said. “More religiosity and more pregnancies.”
Shlomi argued, however, that the hostages and their families sit apart from the rest of the population. For many of them, he said, a turn to religion was a survival tool, and he expects some will go on to live fully observant lives.
But in the broader public he sees two main patterns. The first is piety as a form of public service and solidarity that manifests in personal habits, like observing a single Shabbat or donning tzitzit in honor of the hostages, the fallen, and the soldiers.
The other pattern runs through institutions and organizations that seized on the moment, from ultra-Orthodox groups like Chabad hosting barbecues on army bases to Christian evangelicals joining support efforts.
Although increases outnumbered declines, the Hebrew University and JPPI studies both found a smaller counter-current. About 14% of secular respondents in both surveys said their religiosity had weakened, and 9% of Jewish respondents in the JPPI poll reported a drop in belief in God, a figure that rose to 16% among secular Jews.
The Hebrew University researchers framed their findings through a psychological lens, drawing on terror management theory, which argues that confronting mortality pushes people to double down on their existing worldviews — deepening religious practice for some and weakening it for others.
“During periods of prolonged stress, individuals may reorganize their religious or spiritual orientations by either increasing or decreasing their importance,” said Yaakov Greenwald, who led the study.
It’s not the first time war has nudged Israelis toward faith. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel experienced a notable uptick in people returning to religion, including high-profile secular figures. Film director Uri Zohar shocked the nation by becoming ultra-Orthodox in 1977. A year later, Effi Eitam, a decorated brigadier general and later a politician, did the same.
Historians debate how large that post-’73 wave really was, but at the time the narrative took hold that the near-death experience of the state — Israel was caught off guard and feared annihilation in the first days of that war — followed by an against-all-odds turnaround felt to many like a miracle.
Shlomi said it is still too soon to make firm predictions about how long the current trend will last, given that the country is only now emerging from the crisis. Even so, he believes the scale of the war and the religious wave it produced were deep enough that, a decade from now, it will still be there.
And if the experience of Rozet Levy Dy Bochy’s husband, Peter Griekspoor, is any indication, the war may leave the country not only more observant down the line but with more Jews altogether.
At first, Rozet said, her husband responded in a “very European” way, seeking balance and “both-sides-ing” the situation. She told him that was a luxury of not being Jewish, but that “for us, something in our DNA reacts in moments like this. We’ve been here before.”
But it did not take long for the balance to tilt. As protests spread across Europe and North America and conspiracy theories about Israelis and Jews circulated online, Peter said he was “starting to feel like part of the narrative.”
“I felt the antisemitism was personal,” he said. “Now I actually feel like I’m Jewish. I feel like I want to be part of this people. They are beautiful, they are strong, they are resilient,” he said, before adding with a laugh, “and they are horrible also. Always arguing, always fighting each other.”
Shlomi said that while much of the revival grew out of a real desire for unity and belonging, some of it acquired a coercive edge, with some rabbis and others treating “returning” to faith as the only legitimate response and investing significant funding in amplifying it. “Tefillin and barbecues cost a lot of money,” he said.
He also noted that the rise in religious practice often moved in tandem with a political realignment, with some public figures openly embracing observance. On Channel 14’s flagship “Patriots” current-affairs show, rightwing host Yinon Magal now speaks frequently about becoming more observant since the war, a change that links faith with nationalist politics.
A number of survivors from the traditionally left-leaning kibbutzim on the Gaza border that were attacked on Oct. 7 have described similar movement in their own lives, adopting more religious practices, like remarrying in an Orthodox ceremony, and identifying more strongly with the right. JPPI survey data shows the same trend among Jewish youth, with a clear rightward drift across most political camps.
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Mizrachi, however, bucks that trend. A peace activist and board member of Standing Together, a grassroots Jewish-Arab movement that campaigned against the war, he has grown more observant without changing his politics.
“I am a Jew first, then an Israeli, then a democrat, then a Mizrahi,” he said. “I see God in every aspect of life. But I also ask, until when will we live by the sword and be filled with hate for Gazans? This isn’t the Jewish way.”
For Griekspoor, the Jewish way meant the halachic way, and for the past six months he has been enrolled in an Orthodox conversion program under the Israeli rabbinate, a track that mandates full observance of Jewish law. He says he knows his choice in becoming Jewish defies logic.
“You have the persecution, the hatred, the antisemitism — and you can’t eat cheeseburgers,” he said. “But there is no rational explanation. It’s stronger than me.”
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Elected PA Jewish judge leaves Democratic party, citing ‘disturbingly common’ antisemitism
(JTA) — An elected Supreme Court justice in Pennsylvania announced Monday night that he has left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent, citing concerns about antisemitism.
In a statement, David Wecht, who is Jewish and served as Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party chair from 1998 to 2001, said he believed antisemitism has moved from the fringe of the Democratic Party to the mainstream.
“Nazi tattoos, jihadist chants, intimidation and attacks at synagogues, and other hateful anti-Jewish invective and actions are minimized, ignored, and even coddled,” he wrote. “Acquiescence to Jew-hatred is now disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party.”
Wecht wrote that he had long understood that antisemitism “always festered on the fringe” of the right, a fact that hit home in 2018 when a far-right shooter killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh where he and his wife were married in 1998.
“In the years that have followed, that same hatred has grown on the left,” he said in his statement. “It is the duty of all good people to fight this virus, and to do so before it is too late.”
Wecht previously made national headlines for his 2020 ruling against an effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania.
Through a spokesperson, Wecht declined to be interviewed about his exit from the Democratic Party.
Wecht’s comments come as Democrats wrestle with a range of internal tensions over antisemitism. The ascent of Graham Platner, an oyster farmer who recently covered up a Nazi Totenkopf skull-and-crossbones tattoo, to become Maine’s Democratic candidate for Senate, and the increasing coziness between some progressive politicians and Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer who has said he favors Hamas over Israel, have particularly alarmed some members of the Jewish community.
Wecht is the son of renowned forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, who was involved in investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Wecht’s mother, translator Sigrid Ronsdal, spent the first six years of her life living under Nazi occupation in Norway.
“I know David and his legendary father, Cyril,” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who has clashed with his party over Israel, tweeted following Wecht’s announcement. “As I’ve affirmed, I’m not changing my party—but I fully understand David’s personal choice. The Democratic Party must confront its own rising antisemitism problem.”
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At Abraham Foxman’s funeral, an elegy for the last generation with direct ties to the Holocaust
(JTA) — As mourners gathered Tuesday for the funeral of Abraham Foxman, they were saying goodbye not only to one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the last half-century, but to one of the dwindling number whose moral authority was forged in the Holocaust itself.
Foxman, who died Sunday at 86, spent decades as one of the world’s most recognizable Jewish advocates, serving for nearly 30 years as the ADL’s top professional and another two decades before that in its leadership ranks. Presidents sought his counsel. Antisemites sought his absolution. Popes welcomed him. Prime ministers argued with him.
Many of the speakers at Park Avenue Synagogue credited his accomplishments to his outsized personality, his sense of humor and his intuitive leadership skills. And yet his past hung heavy over the funeral, which also served as an elegy for the last generation of survivors and how, like Foxman, they shaped Jewish communal life in the years after World War II and the founding of Israel. Born in Poland, Foxman survived the war in the care of his Catholic nanny.
“His life story of rising from the ashes is our story,” said Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, in a video tribute. “It is the story of our people born in the world at war. The Holocaust shaped Abe’s character and defined his mission to combat antisemitism and hypocrisy, to call up racism and bias, to speak up for the Jewish people and a Jewish democratic state of Israel.”
Others recalled that beyond fighting antisemitism, Foxman’s past inspired him to build a communal juggernaut that championed pluralism, democracy and civil rights.
“He knew exactly what the absence of those things looked like,” said Stacy Burdett, a former ADL colleague, referring to the Holocaust. “Abe lived in our world as a moral witness, not just to what human beings can survive, but to what they’re obligated to defend.”
Packing the sanctuary were Jewish communal leaders, former ADL colleagues and bold-face Jewish activists such as the lawyer Alan Dershowitz and the New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. (Not able to attend was Jonathan Greenblatt, Foxman’s successor at ADL, whose mother died in Florida on Saturday.)
When they weren’t recalling Foxman’s early trauma and subsequent accomplishments, eulogists painted a portrait of a Jewish communal warrior as a consummate hugger.
Thomas Friedman sent a video tribute, recalling how they met when the future New York Times columnist was a camper and Foxman was a counselor at Herzl Camp in Webster, Wisconsin. (That’s also where Foxman met his wife, Golda, who survives him, as do his two children and four grandchildren.) Friedman said that no matter how often or angrily they disagreed over something Friedman had written, usually about Israel, Foxman would sign off with affection.
“It’s true, if Abe really disagreed with you, you always knew because his text would end ‘love you, hugs,’” said Burdett. “The more strongly he disagreed, the more hugs and the more emojis.”
Former White House domestic policy adviser Susan Rice, in a video tribute, recalled shouting matches with Foxman during the Biden administration that left aides outside her office terrified.
“And when Abe and I emerged laughing and hugging,” she said, “we both had to reassure my team that all was fine, that we loved each other and not to worry.”
Rice credited Foxman with helping shape the Biden administration’s national strategy to combat antisemitism, and thanked him for defending her when others attacked her personally for administration positions on Iran and Israel.
But even as his children and grandchildren recalled Foxman as a family man, the shadow of the Holocaust fell across the synagogue’s ornate, Moorish-style sanctuary.
“You were a hidden child,” his daughter Michelle said, “and at the same time, you sought to hide the trauma from your children.”
She said she learned much of her father’s Holocaust story not from conversations at home but from his speeches, interviews and articles.
Foxman, who became ADL’s national director emeritus when he stepped down in 2015, was certainly among the last survivors to lead a major Jewish organization.
Fewer and fewer of those witnesses remain; according to the Claims Conference, as of January 2026, an estimated 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors are still alive. Nearly all are “child survivors” who were born after 1928.
In discussing how Foxman’s childhood shaped his activism, Sarah Bloomfield, director of the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, recalled his traumatic childhood. His Polish Jewish parents fled to present-day Vilnius after the Nazi invasion of Poland; when Vilnius too came under Nazi control, his parents left him in the care of his nanny, who baptized him as a Catholic.
“This is what he said: ‘I’m only here because one Polish woman made a choice to save a Jewish child,’” Bloomfield recalled Foxman telling her. “She risked her life to protect the life of another human being, a Jewish child in Hitler’s Europe. Her name was Bronislawa Kurpi.”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue, said Foxman was less interested in the “logistics” behind his survival (he and his parents were only reunited after several bitter lawsuits) than in the “singular moral act” of his rescuer. “In a world consumed by fire,” Cosgrove said, “one human being chose courage, one person chose decency, one person chose light.”
His grandson Gideon recalled asking Foxman how his history shaped his life’s work.
“He said that he felt obligated to make something of himself so that all the other Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust didn’t die in vain,” Gideon said.
And up until the end, said Burdett, Foxman was still feeling that obligation, shaped by a cataclysm that for many is becoming a distant memory, when recalled at all.
She recited his remarks last year during Yom Hashoah ceremonies at the U.S. Capitol.
“As a [Holocaust] survivor, my antenna quivers when I see books being banned, when I see people being abducted in the streets, when I see government trying to dictate what universities should teach and whom they should teach,” Foxman said at the time. “As a survivor who came to this country as an immigrant, I’m troubled when I hear immigrants and immigration being demonized.”
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Israeli report on ‘systematic’ Oct. 7 sexual violence seeks to shift debate from denial to accountability
(JTA) — A sweeping new Israeli report on sexual violence committed during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and against hostages in Gaza concludes that the crimes formed part of a deliberate strategy. It also lays out a roadmap for turning two years of documentation into legal prosecution.
The report concludes that “sexual and gender-based violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the October 7 attacks and their aftermath.”
The report comes from Israel’s Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, an independent panel convened in the immediate wake of the attack. The commission was led by Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an attorney and international law expert who was recently awarded the Israel Prize, Israel’s top civilian honor, for her work.
Starting by collecting online material filmed or circulated by Hamas, the commission labored for two years in an effort to generate a factual record that Elkayam-Levy said could withstand the scrutiny and denial that has accompanied claims about sexual violence on Oct. 7 and in its aftermath, particularly the idea that the sexual violence was systematic.
Researchers reviewed and analyzed more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, amounting to more than 1,800 hours of footage, alongside more than 430 testimonies from survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts and family members.
They identified 13 recurring patterns of sexual and gender-based violence across Oct. 7 attack sites, abductions and captivity, including rape, gang rape and other forms of sexual assault, sexual torture, forced nudity, threats of forced marriages, postmortem abuse, the public display of victims and the filming and dissemination of sexualized violence.
The evidence “proves that it wasn’t isolated violence, it wasn’t random,” Elkayam-Levy said. “It was a strategy, carried out with exceptional cruelty on victims and on hostages in captivity.”
The report also says genocide must be examined as a possible legal characterization, citing the “scale, coordination, and systematic nature of the violence,” the targeting of civilians as part of a campaign to destroy Israelis and Jews, and the infliction of severe bodily and mental harm, “including through sexual violence and torture.”
The report devotes specific attention to sexual violence against men and boys, documenting rape, sexual torture, mutilation and sexualized humiliation that the authors say has often been overlooked in public discussion of Oct. 7.
The report includes testimonies that have already surfaced, such as from Amit Soussana and Keith Siegel, two former hostages who said they had been sexually assaulted by their captors.
But it also includes accounts that had not previously been made public, including cases of sexual violence inflicted in the presence or near vicinity of family members. In at least one case the researchers documented, family members held hostage together were forced to perform sexual acts on one another, an example of what the commission characterizes as “kinocidal” sexual violence, meaning violence aimed at destroying family structures by exploiting familial bonds.
Yet the report aims to go beyond simply documenting horrific traumas. A 70-page legal section argues that the documented acts support prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and sexual and gender-based violence linked to terrorism.
It notes that victims of the Oct. 7 attacks represented 52 nationalities, giving multiple governments potential avenues to investigate and prosecute through domestic terrorism laws, extraterritorial jurisdiction or universal jurisdiction.
So far, those efforts remain “scarce and fragmented,” the report says, with investigations or legal steps undertaken in the United States, France, Germany and Canada, as well as at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. In the case of the ICC, its prosecutor sought warrants for Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif over crimes including rape and other sexual violence, but all three Hamas leaders were killed by the IDF and the proceedings were terminated.
The report argues that sexual violence prosecutions do not have to depend only on direct survivor testimony, a central issue for Oct. 7 cases as many victims were murdered, witnesses were traumatized and released hostages could speak only after months in captivity. International courts have relied on direct witnesses, expert witnesses, forensic material, circumstantial evidence and digital documentation, while ICC rules do not require corroboration for sexual violence crimes.
“The report shifts the global conversation from whether this happened to what the consequences should be,” Elkayam-Levy said in an interview ahead of the report’s release. “We’re going to see a before-and-after moment with it.”
Whether that comes to pass remains to be seen. The report arrives in a climate of denial around sexual violence on Oct. 7 that was fueled in part by early accounts that were later challenged. Critics of Israel’s claims have repeatedly pointed to disputed elements in an investigation published in The New York Times in December 2023, including the case of Oct. 7 victim Gal Abdush, whose relative questioned whether there was proof she had been raped, and to accounts of sexual violence by ZAKA first responders that were later debunked. Those cases helped denialists attack the wider body of evidence documented by UN officials, Israeli investigators, journalists and groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Elkayam-Levy herself has been the subject of criticism, with a March 2024 report in Yedioth Aharonoth citing unnamed government officials questioning the commission’s structure and the accuracy of some of her early public claims, including a widely debunked account that a pregnant woman had been found with her womb cut open — criticism that was picked up by skeptics of Oct. 7 sexual violence claims.
In response, Elkayam-Levy said some of the early mischaracterizations reflected the confusion of the first days after the attack, when first responders and those recovering hundreds of bodies were working in traumatic circumstances.
“It is precisely because of that early chaos, and the widespread denial, that this report was prepared under the strictest international verification standards, with every testimony and piece of evidence carefully cross-checked and corroborated,” she said.
Elkayam-Levy said the backlash she personally experienced was “very scary,” with threats to her life and antisemitic groups circulating her image alongside accusations that she was “lying about Hamas.”
The team, made up of about 20 employees and additional volunteers and contributors, worked from a hidden location, with some researchers choosing to remain anonymous throughout.
Elkayam-Levy said the release of the archive may not stop denial from “social media trolls,” but it changes the evidentiary landscape in ways serious observers can no longer ignore.
She pointed to remarks made early on in the war by philosopher Judith Butler, who cast doubt on reports of rape on Oct. 7, comments Elkayam-Levy said caused deep anguish to victims and those documenting the crimes.
“Every item is now archived and here to stay, for her to feel ashamed of what she did and to be remembered as a person who did not stand with the victims, who forgot the purpose of her work as a feminist,” she said.
Elkayam-Levy is optimistic that prosecutions could result. She said accountability may unfold over years and across borders, with some Hamas leaders and perpetrators already hiding in Turkey and Qatar and others likely to reach Western countries.
“I think it will be the same as the Holocaust, that different Nazi leaders were prosecuted around the world,” she said.
Still, Elkayam-Levy said even successful prosecutions would not be enough to convey the magnitude of the crimes or preserve their place in historical memory.
“You don’t learn about the Holocaust from the prosecution of a single person,” she said. “You learn it from the documentation, from the witnesses, the survivors.”
The report calls for an “incontrovertible judicial record,” citing the Nuremberg trials, recent German prosecutions of ISIS crimes against Yazidis and Ukraine’s war-crimes documentation as models for legal efforts that can establish an enduring record as well as punish perpetrators. It recommends a coordinated strategy combining Israeli proceedings with international cooperation, evidence-sharing, specialized war-crimes units and prosecutors trained in sexual and gender-based crimes.
The Civil Commission is not alone in arguing that the sexual violence of Oct. 7 requires a legal response. The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel submitted an early report to the UN in 2024, and the Dinah Project, led by legal experts at Bar-Ilan University’s Rackman Center, published an 84-page report in July concluding that Hamas used sexual violence as a “tactical weapon” during the attacks and in captivity. A month later, the UN Secretary-General listed Hamas among parties “credibly suspected” of patterns of rape or other sexual violence in armed conflict.
Elkayam-Levy said the new report should not be treated only as a document for prosecutors, legal scholars or women’s rights advocates. Sexual violence is too often treated as an issue that “belongs to women’s committees,” she said, when the findings should also be studied by those responsible for national security and counterterrorism.
Accountability should also extend to social media platforms, after Hamas-led perpetrators filmed and circulated images of victims to “glorify the atrocities in real time,” according to the report.
The commission has drawn support from high profile figures including David Crane, founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, former Israeli Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and tech executive Sheryl Sandberg, who has campaigned internationally for recognition of Oct. 7 sexual violence.
The archive is led by Karen Jungblut, a former archivist at the USC Shoah Foundation. The commission has also been approached by people trying to document sexual violence in other atrocity settings, Elkayam-Levy said, including Druze contacts seeking guidance after recent attacks in Sweida, Syria.
The report’s release came a day after the Knesset overwhelmingly passed a law establishing a special military tribunal to try captured Hamas-led Oct. 7 perpetrators, with authority to impose the death penalty in some cases. But it warns that capital punishment could deter international support and extradition, noting that comparable hybrid courts combining domestic and international elements do not permit capital punishment.
Executions, Elkayam-Levy further argued, could overshadow the legal record, divert attention from victims’ suffering and turn the proceedings into a global controversy. “My fear is that the terrorists will be remembered more in the universal, historical memory than the victims themselves.”
In taking testimonies from survivors, Elkayam-Levy said, one of the final questions her team asked was what gave them strength and what justice meant to them. The answers, she said, were striking for how little they had to do with indictments or convictions.
“More than anything else, they want the truth to be heard and for them to be recognized and believed,” she said.
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